| Author | Message | ||
     Giancarlo (Giancarlo) Username: Giancarlo Registered: 11-2008 Posted From: 85.116.228.3 |
I've got hold of this 1,200 pages Rymer's beast from the dime novels era. I've left my bookmark at page 100 after one reading session. The characters are stereotyped but not flat, sometimes there is a liberal transition from past to present tense in the same period, descriptions are naturalistic and generally lacking in metaphor, there is too much talking during crucial action, sentences are often twistedly overlong they have to be read twice or more. I am not so sure the social working classes, which penny-dreadfuls were supposedly aimed to, were such a bunch of semi-analphabetical rugumuffins. I am not saying I love the book. I say it's fun, as I have to set my mind to the same frequency of enjoyment as it might have been almost two centuries ago. So, I like the book and will do my best to go thru all the way. I was supposing it was trash as academic evaluation would have it. Well, it is not. Taken for what it is, it's not undeserving of attention, at least for historic-anthropological reasons, but it's far more that that! I know maybe I should not like the book...but I do, its ominous mass adding to the magnetism. | ||
| Rhysaurus (Rhysaurus) Username: Rhysaurus Registered: 01-2010 Posted From: 212.219.233.223 |
You have embarked on a long journey choosing that book to read! I notice that Penguin are republishing many novels from that era -- books by William Ainsworth, Bulwer-Lytton, Thomas Peckett Prest, Ann Radcliffe and others... | ||
| Stephen Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 194.32.31.1 |
That's great news! The best of those gigantic old horror classics I've read was 'Melmoth The Wanderer' which took me over a year to get through but was worth the effort. Got 'Wagner The Werewolf' lined up for the next time I take the plunge. | ||
| Giancarlo (Giancarlo) Username: Giancarlo Registered: 11-2008 Posted From: 85.116.228.3 |
"Wagner the Werewolf" is good! So is Richard Marsh's "The Beetle" which challenged and won Stoker's "Dracula" by 15 editions to 10...then it was year 1900, Freudian eroticism looming on the horizon and oral symbolism making the scales tilt to Dracula's favour... | ||
| Stephen Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 194.32.31.1 |
Giancarlo, I read 'The Beetle' a few months back and really enjoyed it in a fast-paced pulpy kind of way. Marsh's style reminded me greatly of Sax Rohmer or Dennis Wheatley only with added humour. The monster was highly original as well. Another old classic that is often overlooked as a horror novel is James Hogg's 'The Private Memoirs And Confessions Of A Justified Sinner' - a brilliant tale of diabolism and murder in early 19th C. Scotland. | ||
| Giancarlo (Giancarlo) Username: Giancarlo Registered: 11-2008 Posted From: 85.116.228.3 |
Yes, Stephen, Hogg's book is in my ordering plan! I imagine you have read "Sweeney Todd (or "The String of Pearls") by supposedly Anonymous, a probable Rymer/Prest collaboration. It reads like Dickens turned head down and counts many really hilarious pages, such as in the chapter "The Odour in St. Durstan Cathedral" (if I well remember). Beside the more classical Wordsworth editions ("Australian Ghost Stories" recommended, whereas I've mixed feeling about getting Stoker's "Lair of the White Worm" cum "Lady of the Shroud"), there are a couple American presses devoting to Gothics and Victorian thrillers, namely Valancourt and Zittaw presses. I own Edward Montagu's "Demon of Sicily" and Florence Marryat's "Blood of the Vampire" from the former. The Demon story is sort of Lewis's "The Monk" but too unintentionally comical, to modern taste at least, to be a great novel of terror, the accumulation of clichés prevents that. Marryat's prose in the "Vampire" works like an opiate, it's very formally written but we have a different kind of monster than expected: no Undead, no Blood, no Fangs, but a curse detroying the lives of those whom the female character would project her love to. I have nothing yet from Zittaw, though I'd be interested in Marie Corelli's "Vendetta", a Victorian thriller. They have some Gothic short stories anthology forthcoming, that's what I'm looking forward to. |